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Firefox Reviewed in the Globe and Mail
Eric Giguere writes "Today's Globe and Mail has a Firefox review titled A bug-free surfing zone in its Friday review section. Slashdot readers probably won't like the last phrase, though: 'Until Firefox finds a way around that, you might have to keep Internet ExplORer around -- just for emergencies, of course.'"
Doesn't ActiveX only run under Windows? (Or did I miss yet another meeting?) That's OS where it's all but impossible to delete IE, right? Rendering the whole point about keeping IE around kind of moot.
I haven't used IE to surf since I got firefox. And I have spread it around campus and have received only one complaint. Long live open source!
This is another way of starting a sig with this and ending it with that.
Yes, it's another entirely ironic aspect of Windows: you have to use their insecure web browser to update their buggy OS. I'm really surprised that the detaching of WU from IE wasn't part of some antitrust settlement.
That being said anyone have recent penetration statistics. FF was gaining 0.5% every two weeks through Mid Decemeber but this is the last data I have seen. Anyone tracking this on their own site, the absolute is maybe less important the the trend.
Help fight continental drift.
Never mind Active X. How about all those crappy sites that use Javascript to check the browser by name/version instead of using professional methods that check the browser's capability?
One day (in the far distant future, no doubt), Javascript (/VBscript) will have either been seen to be the quick/dirty solution and deprecated with dynamic pages being server based or, the DOM will have been agreed as a proper object model with an agreed API. Perhaps then, a decent script language that is consistent across builds/OSes and even the same build on different OSes will act the same way.
I'm not holding my breath tho'...
Yes, exactly. People should begin to understand that Firefox's lack of ActiveX is actually a good thing.
In the article they say that it's a good thing because of security, but the Firefox programmers should find a way around it. Well there is an ActiveX extension out there, if you feel like voluntarily letting people hijack your computer...
I work in a shop that is exclusively IE. In fact, they have a militant attitude to anything non-MS. Needless to say, I downloaded Firefox onto my workstation and opened up our corporate intranet site, the thing was a mess. Turns out the developers decided to use non-standard HTML and CSS along with sloppy coding practices. Of course, I'm sure someone got a huge contract for developing the site, but I fear that heads will roll once IE catches up to actually implementing standards.
I only wish I didn't submit my resignation last week, because it would have been fun to watch the IT head honchos get it when IE 7 comes out. Of course that assumes that IE 7 might implement standards. Not holding my breath though!
I'm fairly certain there's no actual Netscape code in Firefox. It's based on Gecko which was written from scratch by the Mozilla team, so I doubt there's much there.
Instead of posting "bitchfest" comments here, perhaps we should politely email the author and help him broaden his understandingof the issues?
Here is what I wrote to him, as an example.
While I am sure it is not perfect, I believe it touches on the matters he clearly does not yet understand.
Emailed to: mingram@globeandmail.ca
Re: Your article:
A bug-free surfing zone
By Mathew Ingram
Friday, January 14, 2005 - Page R31
Hi Matthew.
While I have to thank you for a relatively informative article, I also have to point out that you are still, in many ways "Not getting it"
You have fallen into two fundamental errors of understanding:
First:
" That engine forms the basis for a new browser called Firefox, which is free for Windows and Mac users"
In this you badly missed the point of the Mozilla project.
Firstly the Mozilla project is where various browsers, Gecko based and other, spawn from.
It was an example of the first major project ceded to the Open Source movement.
It was decided that the best way to encourage development, without being tied to a development budget, was to move the development to an Open Source model, where thousands of users/develeopers could adopt and continue the development unfettered by traditional copyright and ownership issues.
By moving the Netscape source to a "copyleft" model this has clearly demonstrated an alternative and much more useful model for ownership and develeopment.
Your second case of misunderstanding:
Adding insult to injury you only mentioned the old (and many say obsolete) Microsoft and Apple environments, and totally ignored the much more relevant and modern Open Soruce communities, such as Linux and FreeBSD.
Thirdly, in the last paragraph you wrote:
"Firefox isn't perfect. It still has some bugs, which isn't surprising considering it only recently came out of "beta" or testing mode. It also can't do much with pages that require features only Internet Explorer has, such as the ability to run Active-X programs."
While I fully agree that Firefox is NOT perfect, the one item you chose as an erxample is not a bug!
ActiveX and similar are not features, but instead are what can be called "malware".
A model for extensions that is so insecure and flawed is not to be supported.
It was a fatal error by Microsoft, and continues to be so.
Nobody is interested in "fixing" this.
If you want an extension model with some practical features, the world has already settled on a few, most notably PHP and Java. These can be secured, and can be considered "safe" extensions when properly implemented.
The only "bug" that is relevant here is the continued dependancy by a handful of misguided developers who are still using ActiveX on web pages.
The severity of this bug is such that the US Dept. of Homeland Security issued an advisory advising people to NOT use Internet Explorer.
Internet Explorer and ASP IS the "bug".
Avoiding it's faults is an improvement, NOT a "bug"
BTW, whether you want to Internet Explorer installed on a Windows system is not a choice you get to make. M$ have integrated the browser into the OS in a fashion that does not allow you to remove it.
All you can do is remove links to it. These are called "shortcuts" in Windows terms.
Maybe next time you foray into this arena, good intentions in hand, you might want to submit your article for peer review in the relevant communities. I will be glad to point you in the directions for this if you like.
Feel free to ask.
BTW, this highlights what is probably the strongest feature of Open Source software: Peer review.
By submitting code, text, and other means of expression to peer review, we utilize a wide community of people to assist in improving our works, avoiding the pitfalls of well intentioned, but misadvised concepts and cases where we simply were not aware of a relevant matter on the topic.
We are all going to make mistakes, but i
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
Firefox is still inappropriate for many foreign language websites that embed their fonts in their webpage. Firefox has yet to get licensing to use the (bitstream? embedded) system to display webpages.
This is the only reason I haven't switched to firefox.
Sure, ActiveX will go away eventually. Microsoft itself is moving away from it. But that has nothing to do with what end users need now
Windows Update is not a reason to keep IE around, I work in an office that has gone to Firefox only browsing to prevent the computers from being filled with adware and spyware and let me too you it has helped 1000%. We use to have to keep IE as an option for Windows Update but now with Automatic Update, Windows XP handles all the downloading and updating without IE or those nasty ActiveX extensions. Seriously Firefox and Windows automatic update has saved well over 100 hours of tech support at work.
I wonder if anyone has lost their job because of Firefox? Downsizing the IT department because there are so many less adware and spyware related calls?
You Sir will be wanting "SessionSaver"
http://www.pikey.me.uk/mozilla/
Save your Firefox layout and restore it later, even after a crash.
I love firefox. I have converted a large portion of my friends to it from IE. But firefox hasn't gotten to the point where it needs to be to eliminate IE.
For work I must enter two sites for retail sales of Nextel and DirecTV. Both of these websites (not the main site, but alternate sites just for direct/indirect retailers) do not work in firefox. No they do not use activex at all, merely IE-specific code.
The indirect channel for Nextel breaks once you log in, as the entire side menu doesn't appear (and there are no alternate links anywhere!). When using a mac, the links don't work at all no matter what browser you use (even IE for mac!).
The directv retailer site breaks after login the moment I attempt to enter their marketing portion of the site. Since all I do for my company is marketing, this is the only portion of the site I visit.
For these two sites I must switch to IE. No other browser I have tried works. The behavior of another site I use for Nextel marketing has 3 errors as well, 2 of which I have found work-arounds (refreshing the page lol). But another, which uses an input box, doesn't pop-up the correct window (even though I specifically state that this particular site should allow pop-ups).
I don't want an integrated download manager. That way leads to bloatware. I'm happy using a third-party external download manager (GetRight).
Truely removing MSIE and all browsing components requires switching to another shell, such as Litestep. If you don't, completely removing MSIE/mshtml/etc will break the shell. XP Lite is nice though, as you can remove DCOM and other required windows components if you only need one app to run and don't care about the rest of windows.
I have IE disabled on machines where I work. If I need to access windows update I just use a snap-in to windows update (or office update) in mmc. I have one mmc set up with most of the admin tools I need so I don't have to dig through the control panel.
Firefox is hardly bug-free. Use it to access my resume and you'll find a really nasty Javascript bug. (The link to my email is generated on the fly, to hide it from spambots. The hover behavior works correctly in IE but not Firefox.) At this point in time, Firefox has a lot fewer bugs (or at least a lot fewer bugs that really matter) than Internet Explorer. But this has as much to do with the increasing flakiness of Internet Explorer as with the improvement in Firefox.
As much as we love to call IE "not standards-compliant," we have to admit that for now, since it has so much of the market share, Internet Explorer effectively is the standard for the web.
Tools such as 'valgrind' are great for catching memory problems like the one you described. However, it is best to use them continuously during development (ideally running automatic regression tests inside them). It's virtually impossible to clean up a huge amount of low quality code after the fact.
Frankly the firefox codebase is the result of 7 years of development done largely without unit tests or even basic QA. As a result, they have leaks, bloat, and severe malformed HTML DoSes that lock up all browser tabs/windows.
The key to good engineering is complete self-honesty, but these days it looks like firefox is being managed by a self-delusional marketing organization with no interest in fixing its serious technical problems.
Linux users are encouraged to run 'valgrind firefox' prior to modding this post down for not towing slashdot's party line.
Your mailto link would also fail for anyone with JS turned off... including IE users. You can't blame firefox for that.
If you want to hide you emails, convert the letters to their numerical equivs manually, the post.
see here: http://www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html
I did some more research after that post. If you want to run firefox under valgrind you actually need to use 'firefox --debugger valgrind'. With 'valgrind firefox', the startup script causes valgrind to analyze the script, rather than the actual browser process.
Anyway, results with a single blank firefox 1.0 window:
==6273== ERROR SUMMARY: 83 errors from 5 contexts (suppressed: 272 from 3)
==6273== malloc/free: in use at exit: 691499 bytes in 12633 blocks.
==6273== malloc/free: 163851 allocs, 151218 frees, 25635248 bytes allocated.
which IMHO is rather unacceptable for a 1.0 release.
Whaaaa?
I'm using Suse 9.2 Pro and my FF and TB installs can DEFINETLY "crossover" as you describe.
When I click a mailto link in FF it spawns TB for me.
When I click a URL in TB it will spawn FF and open the page for me.
The best part is, I didn't do anything special to make it happen...it just did it.
"My bank uses plain HTML forms and javascript, so does Bellsouth, the power company, the cable company, and other various sites I conduct business on."
Don't be so sure that they don't have ActiveX stuff for those browsers that support it. It's easy to detect a browser and send the user to the appropriate page for the right rendering engine and plugin support. Just because you don't have ActiveX doesn't mean that it'll be broken.
If you want to see how many pages use ActiveX, even if for stupid things like color cycling or logo animation, run Microsoft's browser and disable ActiveX. It'll prompt every page that it loads that would use ActiveX if it were enabled.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Yeah, IIRC, there was no version 1...
.8 better than Netscape!" animated GIFs were all the rage.
2.0 - MS branded spyglass. "We're
3.0 - Coolbar, better bookmark handling, actually quite a stable browser, despite also pushing in VBScript and ActiveX.
4.0 - Introduced DOM as well as n+1 security holes.
5.x - Lots of fixes, some CSS improvements...
6.x - More CSS improvements, though still not great.
It should be 5.x, or even 4.x because of the version 1.0 thing.
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